Skip to content

‘Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space’ – Met Breuer, New York

Marisa Merz - Untitled

Marisa Merz (Italian, b. 1926). Untitled, 1993. Copper wire, unfired clay, steel structure. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione Merz

‘Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space’ – Met Breuer The Met Breuer presents the first major retrospective in the United States of the Italian painter, sculptor, and installation artist Marisa Merz (born Turin, Italy, 1926). ‘Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space’, January 24–May 7, 2017]]>

Source: The Met Breuer, New York

“Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space” brings together five decades of work to explore Merz’s prodigious talent and influence. The exhibition features her early experiments with nontraditional art materials and processes, her mid-career installations that balance intimacy with impressive scale, and the enigmatic portrait heads she created after 1975.

The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Merz gained international prominence as part of the circle of artists associated with Arte Povera in the 1960s. An avant-garde movement that rejected Italy’s postwar material wealth in favor of “poor” materials, Arte Povera was identified with the radicalism of the student movement but proclaimed no stylistic or ideological credo except the negation of existing codes and art world limitations. As the sole female protagonist of the movement and one of the few Italian women at the time to present her work in major international venues, she showed a practice that was inflected by gender and cultural differences. Merz’s challenging and evocative body of work was deeply personal and decidedly anticareerist. Its consequence and scope also exceeded its occasionally diminutive scale. Ultimately, Merz’s work was as much a response to her own experience as it was to the art of her contemporaries, and her pioneering practice exists in the interstices between art and life that has become so central to contemporary art making.

Related content

‘Max Beckmann in New York’ at the Metropolitan Museum (exhibition, 2016)

Follow us on:

‘Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space’ – Met Breuer, New York